My attendance at AAS meetings began with the 46th meeting in
September 1931 at the brand new Perkins Observatory. This
was the first semester of my junior year at Indiana
University. Professor Wilbur Cogshall, my astronomy
professor, took me to the meeting, and paid my expenses for
dormitory accommodations and meals. Hence, my attendance at
AAS meetings covers a span of nearly 68 years.

There have been so many "memorable" meetings that it is hard
to pick just one. However, the 99th meeting in December 1957
at Butler University in Indianapolis, a joint meeting with
the AAAS, is memorable because I was in a wheel chair and
using crutches, following an injury to my right knee cap.

I was a member of the AAAS Committee to select the "best
paper" presented at the meeting to receive the Newcomb
Cleveland Prize, and Martin Schwarzschild's first report of
results from Project Stratoscope was on the program. I
showed up at the Committee meeting in my wheel chair, and
nominated Martin's paper for the "best paper" award. The
Committee asked a lot of questions and then approved the
paper by a unanimous vote. The wheel chair and crutches
obviously played a role in convincing the Committee that I
had strong feelings about the merits of Martin's paper.

Allan Sandage was the Warner Prize Lecturer, and reported on
the current status of his revision of the cosmic distance
scale. Hubble's 1936 distances needed to be increased by a
factor of five to ten.

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